Sandy Allen saved her best writing for an essay on Dion Lee.
As part of a weeklong program in November, everyone at Louisville’s Ballard High School submitted an original work, including Allen, the principal. She chose to write about Lee, a former star basketball player at Ballard who went on to play at Northwestern.
“That particular day, we were to write about one of the most memorable people that we had met,” Allen said. “It just so happened I thought about Dion, and all the things he used to do around here. That I saw a mature, polished young man that we were proud of. It won a prize for me.”
On Thursday, Lee and former teammate Dewey Williams were implicated in a point-shaving scandal at Northwestern, sending out shock waves that maintained their momentum as they rolled across the country. Lee, Williams and Matt Purdy all were alleged to have been involved with fixing the outcome of three Northwestern games during the 1994-95 season, but only Lee and Williams face charges.
“This has devastated me,” Allen said.
Steve Coffman, Williams’ basketball coach at North Central High School in Indianapolis, was similarly stunned.
“I’m not saying I would suspect any of my kids, but Dewey would be the last on my list,” he said.
Lee and Williams, who will forever be linked in this scandal, came from markedly different backgrounds. Lee’s father had served jail time, and his parents were divorced, forcing his mother to raise him on one inadequate income. Williams, the only child of a retired Army staff sergeant major, comes from a stable, middle-class, two-parent home.
Lee, 24, was a talkative, outgoing, somewhat erratic guard. Williams, 25, was so quiet and affable that his coaches had to urge him to be more aggressive.
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But their college athletic careers seemed to merge from their freshman year on, when both were declared academically ineligible just before the Big Ten Conference season. Neither achieved his potential as Northwestern slogged through losing seasons in three of their four years.
The Wildcats were on their way to a 1-17 conference finish in 1995 when Lee, with the promise of a big payoff, allegedly recruited Williams and Purdy to fix the outcome of the Feb. 15 Wisconsin game. They would make the same arrangement twice more. The last time, Lee and Williams conferred with their bookies by telephone from an Ann Arbor, Mich., hotel room.
That seamy image is hard for friends, former teammates and family to accept.
“If you could see my mouth right now–it’s hanging open,” said Paul Loggan, assistant athletic director at Williams’ old high school. “Dewey was a quiet young man who worked hard to become a good player.”
Lee also won over many people during high school.
“This kid, I could ask him to do anything for Ballard High School,” said Allen, the principal. “He was a tall, lanky, skinny kid. He was happy-go-lucky. He had a great mom who was very involved with the program. He was just spirited. He loved the school, and everyone loved Dion.”
Life at Northwestern wasn’t quite as good for Lee. His gregarious, cocky, look-at-me style did not sit well with coach Ricky Byrdsong, who replaced Bill Foster during Lee’s junior year. Byrdsong changed Lee’s uniform number and began referring to him by his real first name, Kenneth, because “we don’t like anything about No. 24 Dion Lee.”
“There’s no longer a Dion Lee who plays for Northwestern,” Byrdsong said on another occasion, although Lee clearly preferred Dion, his middle name.
After Lee had started 16 games his sophomore year, Byrdsong demoted him to the bench the next season. NU’s media guide that year noted that “(Lee’s) one-on-one skills and wide-open style of play did not mesh with Ricky Byrdsong’s deliberate half-court motion offense.” The tailspin continued in his senior season when he was suspended six games for betting on college games through an on-campus bookie, but he moved back into the starting lineup and set an NU record with 10 three-point baskets in one game. He finished his career with an 8.1 scoring average.
Williams also hit a few roadblocks in Evanston, although he might have been better equipped than Lee to shrug off disappointment.
He grew up in basketball country. North Central High, with an enrollment of 3,100 students, held its own with even larger and more potent city schools and won a sectional championship in Williams’ senior year. Williams was neither a leader nor a follower, according to his former coach. He was just happy to percolate along in the post, where at 6 feet 9 inches, he didn’t always dominate as much as he could have.
“If anything, he was a little soft,” Coffman said. “As a coach, one thing you always wanted him to do was get meaner.”
Indiana, Purdue and Indiana State all recruited Williams, but he opted for Northwestern because of its academic reputation. “He knew he wasn’t going to be a pro player,” Coffman said. “This was an avenue for him to get an education. He went there for all the right reasons.”
Williams’ Wildcat debut was inauspicious. At the close of an exhibition game against Brazil his freshman year, with Northwestern trailing by one point, Williams was fouled on a buzzer shot and stepped to the line to attempt two free throws. But an electrician inadvertently doused a bank of overhead vapor lights, which take some time to recharge. Rather than make his first-year player wait indefinitely, Foster elected to have Williams shoot in semidarkness. Both shots clanked off the rim.
Lee and Williams were part of a recruiting class that Foster deemed at the time to be the finest of his eight years at NU. Foster originally tabbed Williams as a power forward, but after returning from his academically related hiatus, he wound up playing extensively at center. He ended his varsity career with modest averages of five points and 3.2 rebounds a game.
Williams was unavailable for comment. His mother, Myrna, said she and her husband would reserve comment “until we’ve had a chance to talk to our son personally.”
NU Athletic Director Rick Taylor said Lee and Williams are unlikely co-defendants.
“Dewey Williams, I’m shocked by,” he said. “Dewey came from a good family. Dion was on and off–a flaky kid, sometimes there, sometimes not. He came from a hard background, hard circumstances. But let’s not ever use that as an excuse.
” . . . There’s no common denominator in their backgrounds where you can say, `Hey, this is what caused it.’ “
Coffman hopes that Williams’ life won’t be ruined by the allegations.
“He just must have made a bad choice, and once the mistake was made, the door was closed behind him,” Coffman said. “It’s too bad somebody got him to walk through a door he couldn’t get out of.”